I can’t write about Antler, because Idk. I invite anyone who has been through Antler, to collaborate on this section.

The EF Framework

You can read all about it here. This is a great reading list and along with YC content will teach you a lot about startups. Don’t binge read this this stuff, some seemingly simple concepts really need time to digest. E.g. scalibility is a concept that seems simple but one could write books about.

I’ll very briefly go over one that is only briefly mentioned in this database, but that I find very useful.

Non-obvious beliefs

EF encourages you to think about your past experiences and what insights you’ve gained there. Ideally, you should made some surprising insights, that someone who is vaguely acquainted with the field would have no way of knowing after a few minutes of research.

Examples of obvious beliefs:

• Millennials have a hard time buying real estate
• Teenagers spend too much time on their phones
• Genomics is getting cheaper (even if you didn’t know, anyone can google this in 1 minute)

Examples of non-obvious beliefs:

• Good teachers are coaches primarily, there is little knowledge transfer
• 2nd hand batteries would be 50% more efficient, if they were stored properly
• Many defi products fail, because it’s very hard to properly test solidity code

Essentially, don’t work on stuff that you have no experience in. It’s usually very hard to solve a problem better than the people who face them every day.

The idea here is to weed out all the startup ideas that everyone has or can have. People tend to come up with similar ideas all the time. Airbnb for X, fractional real estate investing, investing with friends, an AI that does legal work, etc. Usually, these are bad startup ideas.

It takes some experience in the space to realise the real paint points. E.g. AI can do legal work but it’s more about document meta data and tags, than figuring out the legal logic. It takes some legal experience to know this.